A group of Polish intellectuals, researchers and activists call for a series of strong measures to help Europe recover from the crisis generated by the coronavirus epidemic in this open letter to the presidents of the European Parliament, Commission and Council, and to "all the politicians of goodwill". It has already been signed by more than 240 leading European personalities.

I’m afraid I CANNOT agree with the measures proposed in the article (maybe except for the point 4 if done within the context of a deeper reform). Not only they wouldn’t help - the assumption that any problem can be solved just by pouring more euros to it, is naive - but it would also destroy the whole economy. No wonder that these measures are proposed primarily by southern Europeans (who are historically used to have economies based on inflow of external wealth from the New World and just replace the New World with EU) and Poles (who are (in)famous for their skill to squeeze maximum benefits from EU for themselves out of every situation).

What we need is to stop thinking about money and focus on structural changes: take the current unfortunate global lockdown caused by the pandemic as an opportunity to optimize our (global/societal as well as local/personal) modus operandi. Every country, every corporation, every organization, every individual was thrown into the “water” of the pandemic lockdown and had to adjust their everyday operations. All the things that were taboos and for which people always looked for reasons why they cannot be done, have suddenly become the only way to operate. And since due to the rush the results are far from perfect, everyone had to be creative suddenly and provided a tangible proof that it is possible to operate differently… After the pandemic wave ends, we will have to take the time to seriously think what experience can we take from our operations during quarantine, and how to improve and adjust the pandemic-time operations to be efficiently used in the post-pandemic era.

It’s impossible to name all the possible changes because they are countless. They are primarily associated with digitization of our lives (even EU pundits have suddenly found out that they don’t need plenty of office seats and don’t have to meet in person to discuss every marginal issue but video meetings are enough) and also de-globalization (dependence on imports from distant parts of the worlds proved to be troubled in a crisis not only because of the physical problems with transport but also insufficient supervision over quality of the imported products and also decisions of the countries where corporations are located or to whom they belong).

So basically, EU (as well as virtually everybody does) has many issues to think about how to improve them in the future. Such changes may lead to better use of resources, better efficiency of work and in summary to better competitiveness and sustainability, including the environmental sustainability. The worst approach would be to aim to return the society to pre-pandemic inefficient era simply by forcing ECB to print enormous sums of money used to cover spending spree of politicians in order to keep the pre-pandemic lifestyles without pre-pandemic work!